First let’s begin with a bit of backstory:

Davidson was formed in 2005 based on the following observations:

1. Some companies in the last 20 years have favoured shareholder satisfaction at the expense of employee quality of work life. As a result, paternalistic bosses gave way to a new breed of “super-wage” managers whose targets and pay were closely linked to performance and the company’s financial results. Making financial targets the priority often led to decisions that were painful for employees, like forced relocations and offshoring. It should therefore come as no surprise if a company is “cut off” from its employees.

2. Consulting firms, whose strongest asset is their people, embraced this trend too. So over the years their brand images took a knock, and even more importantly, so did their employees’ working environments, due to a combination of the following factors:

• project profitability was prioritised to the detriment of the consultants’ career development
• recruitment standards dropped in response to the high staff turnover (short-termism) linked to a rapid loss of any sense of belonging to their company

In these uninspiring circumstances, managers often retreated behind a hard, cynical shell, making matters worse. And so the industry witnessed a gradual, paradoxical “dehumanisation” in companies whose only capital is human.
In light of this, we decided to go against the grain and put the individual at the heart of our company, creating a healthy, vibrant and fun workplace. The Davidson project is therefore an attempt to show it’s possible to develop a business that reconciles excellence and well-being at work through an almost exclusively qualitative approach focused on

• Equality
• Deep respect for our stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers)
• Creativity to optimise our processes through an adhocratic approach
• Respect in a two-way street

Alongside this, we hope that: The Davidson teams engage, therefore
Our productions are high-quality and find their market, therefore
The company performs well, so
We prohibit ourselves from allocating our earnings to external growth, therefore
We can give back to our employees the proceeds of their efforts in various forms, therefore
The loop closes and results in a repeating cycle in which the employee knows their investment is valued and returns this recognition in the form of increased commitment.

If you’d like to learn more about this and many other things: “Management succeeds when employees who don’t work for pleasure take pleasure in the work they do” André Comte Sponville